Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Doubleday ($23.95)

by Michelle Reale

Propelled by the conventional wisdom that what is unknown in our lives hurts and corrodes more than what we know, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's latest book of short stories subtly takes the possibility of good in our lives and gives it a little twist. Her human but flawed characters constantly err; they manage to find tiny pin pricks of redemption in situations that seem otherwise capable of laying the fragile human spirit to waste, but their "solutions" often become resignations.

In these nine short stories, Divakaruni focuses on the lives of women almost exclusively, no doubt traversing terrain both familiar and close to her heart. Males, when they do appear, are ancillary to the actual stories themselves, existing instead as shadowy or fragmented characters lending masculine scenery and staying close to the frayed edges.

In the opening story, "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," Divakaruni shows an aging Indian mother who has left India to live with her son and his family treading the rocky terrain of American culture. Culture shock would be putting it mildly; poor Mrs. Dutta cannot sleep comfortably on her "Perma Rest" American mattress, bought for her, with good intentions, by her aloof son and his increasingly inscrutable wife. Feeling like little more than a stranger in the house, Mrs. Dutta pens letters to her steadfast friend Roma in India. While her letters contain glowing accounts of American life, nothing could really be further from the truth. Her existence is painful and alienating. Here, Divakaruni explicates beautifully the preoccupation many immigrants have with living exemplary so-called "American" lives. Her son and his wife worrying over what the neighbor's think when Mrs. Dutta drapes her saris over the fence to dry is both poignant and amusing. Divakaruni's writing is both precise and contrived in this opening story, perhaps most realistically highlighting, at least to some sensibilities, the divide between East and West. While Mrs. Dutta brims with "smother love," tasty meals, and true involvement in the lives of the only family she has left, her efforts are spurned at every turn. Divakaruni is exceptional at slowly building a story line and quietly tearing it down in the end—an effect present in nearly every story in this collection, though to varying degrees.

Interestingly, two stories in the collection focus on brother and sister relationships; both stories place their female narrators in the familiar roles of conciliator and interpreter of emotions, not to mention the ever-present (ever needful?) mother figure to their brothers, irregardless of whether younger or older than themselves. In "The Intelligence of Wild Things" a sister attempts to heal an ever-growing rift between her brother and their mother before death intervenes. Because she cannot do this directly, the sister decides to implore her brother with a story, a fable of sorts, conceding that whether or not he "listens" and whether or not he "hears" is now a roll of the dice. She thinks to herself: "We stand side by side, shoulders touching. The wind blows though us, a wild intelligent wind. The white bird flies directly into the sun." This is a placid and surrendering image in sharp and violent contrast to the young brother and sister in "The Forgotten Children" who are alternately brutalized and loved, yet still fiercely loving of parents who fail to protect them in any fundamental way. Again, the sister attempts to forge a perverse sort of normality and shelter her younger brother, causing her to feel that "perhaps to disappear is the next best thing to being forgotten." Divakaruni describes the abuse of the children in matter of fact ways and this unemotional tone is unnerving, but achieves what she probably set out to do: enrage the reader before they even realize what is happening.

One might rightfully ask what the errors in our lives actually are. The book's epigraph, from Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother, states: "Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you." This collection does not illuminate, nor does it seek find humor in the crossing of cultures and the problem of situating oneself uncomfortably between East and West. Instead, it seems that the errors of our lives, whether known or unknown, are the great equalizers in these quiet and devastating stories. Divakaruni hits her emotional target every time, but rather than outright murder, she kills you softly—and you never see it coming.

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Susan Coll
Simon & Schuster ($23)

by Julie Madsen

“I'm not a Marxist!" Coll's protagonist, Ella, exclaims repeatedly throughout the novel. It is the defining sentiment for the entire book, whose title could woo real champions of Marxist theory with its Marx-from-a-postmodern-perspective allusion. The book will probably not be such a disappointment for readers who are open to a quirky romantic tale with light overtones of political theory—an odd mix to be sure, but perhaps revolutionary in its own way.

Ella is a political theory student, nearly 30, who has chosen Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx's daughter, as her thesis subject—specifically, Eleanor's involvement with a married man, which Ella believes led to her debilitating depression and, ultimately, suicide. Ella's fascination with Eleanor's fate escalates as she discovers uncanny similarities to her own romantic life, although Ella is much less prone to suicide than to shopping her worries away.

While enmeshed in her romantic woes, Ella finds herself employed by a slightly unbalanced Marx enthusiast called the Colonel, who is bent on bringing Marxist thought back in vogue to modern-day masses via mementos such as "smiling Marx" T-shirts, coffee mugs, and the like, to be sold on a website that Ella is to construct. His ultimate goal is to have "people in America walking around speaking in Marxisms. You know, ‘Workers of the world, unite,’ that sort of thing, only more relevant and less threatening." Coll is not subtle with irony; she hypes it as flashily as the Colonel does his beloved bearded icon.

Ella, caught between becoming a dispenser of cheap trifles that inadvertently ridicule more than they promote Marxist thought, and dealing with her personal issues, personifies perfectly her generation's ambivalence toward the radicalism and militancy of the previous generation: When she hears a poem from a college twenty-something about revolution, introduced by his comment that "the time is ripe, I think," she ponders, "Was the time ripe for revolution, or for a poem about revolution, or maybe for a mail-order catalog about revolution?"

Karlmarx.com begins with the perfect epigraph, a quote from Marx himself: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Coll’s book is a clear result of this phenomenon.

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Fanny Howe
Semiotext(e) / Native Agents Series ($11.95)

by Christopher Martin

. . . the history of a head is unavoidable being everywhere

This is the history of the head of Henny: estranged wife, surrogate mother, and mothering friend. If you add to this list her intensely religious brand of atheism, it appears, clear as ether, Henny is very much on her own. She is an invisible energy that suffuses the life of (and lives in) the book. Paradoxically, what is invisible here is also indivisible—"unavoidable being everywhere." As a character, Henny lingers submissively behind a backdrop of silent concern. Her function as a narrator, however, is to hoist the entire structure of the novel onto her brittle, uneven shoulders and deliver all the embarrassing facts directly to us, her reader/God. In order to insure the honesty of this confession, Henny pledges to tell an inclusive story without the emotional duplicity of what she calls "sequence":

Sometimes I think that God witnesses events sideways and doesn't stop because it all goes by so fast, and God can't believe what God just saw. So it is important to tell you everything, God.

Where there is "everything" there is certain contradiction, and Howe delights in using it to her advantage. Henny is a poor, pale character of little personality in an alternatively rich, flamboyant, and colorful world. Although she describes her prose as employing a "forced lack of style," she often lapses into hauntingly lyrical stretches: "Sitting outside at night was like passing around a razor to shave a zebra down to its first shape. The black sky is really a weight, can hurt, so heavy a dump of stars, some falling all turning together bare naked between them. God planted the glass that grew language." Finally, after nearly 300 pages of fragment, quandary, and moral debate, the action returns right back to where it began: the story of a woman, her mostly unconsummated love, and the children (young and old) that she has protected and preserved. Only then do we realize the full breadth and beauty of the narrative Howe has surreptitiously constructed all along.

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Nicholas Mosley
Dalkey Archive Press ($13.95)

by Jason Picone

The difficulty of relating the disparate fields of literature and science, the invasiveness of technology in people's lives and the search for the mythical Garden of the Hesperides are all at the center of Nicholas Mosley's latest novel. Narrated by a nameless teenager, The Hesperides Tree is a brilliant fiction of ideas, supplying a multitude of theories and worldviews while ultimately deferring to the reader's judgment in how to best sort and decipher the book's plethora of information.

Like many of Mosley's novels, the characters in The Hesperides Tree are brainy and thoughtful aesthetes whose lives are engrossed in erudite debates and dilemmas. The male protagonist struggles to decide on a concentration in college, unable to discern whether natural science or literature is more likely to answer his soul-searching questions about his role in life. While the young Englishman decides to pursue literature, the choice fails to satisfy or solve anything, resulting in only more questions concerning why no academic discipline can seem to truly educate him. His friend scorns the impotence of the academy, arguing that "human beings can alter the world, but they don't do this by talking about it." The academy also fails to provide any advice to the protagonist on how to keep pervasive technologies from corrupting him, a constant worry that troubles him.

Though it has become commonplace for contemporary novelists to sound off on the increasing self-alienation that people suffer at the hands of technology, Mosley manages to infuse the subject with a fresh feel by including a number of nefarious new developments. In terms of the author's range, it's impressive that a man who is almost eighty can not only convincingly assume the first-person voice of a teenager, but can also write compellingly on how internet porn impacts his young protagonist's sexuality. The young man attempts to resist the seduction of pornography, but is fascinated as well as repulsed by it:

One could . . . embark on a laborious journey past advertisements and warnings and promotional lures until one reached a site where bums and breasts bloomed like exotic flowers and vegetables. . . Some of my schoolfellows had the use of credit-cards and by giving their numbers one could go deeper into the haunted forest with strange images of animals and ghouls and torture-chambers and children. But then it began to seem that the tendrils and roots of the forest were stretching down, round, up, to entrap one . . .

Beyond the lure of the internet, the narrator is disturbed by other technological advances; he reads reports of an experimental bio-weapon, the actual existence of which is unclear. The weapon kills only individuals with a certain genetic make-up, an ideal weapon for an aggressive party afraid of harming their own. Coupled with his fear of overt destruction is the looming millennium and its insidious bug, a techno-illness he likens to the bio-weapon. He believes both have the potential to silently infect and destroy, killing off choice peoples or systems while passing over others.

Unable to explain the world and its increasingly destructive tendencies through his studies, the narrator turns inward, searching first within himself, then reaching out to his family and friends for the enlightenment that has heretofore eluded him. On a trip with his family to western Ireland, he spies a young woman, Julie, with whom he immediately feels a deep connection. When chance eventually thrusts the two together, he wonders about the role coincidence plays in shaping lives and whether or not he has the power to control his destiny:

The idea that one lives in a world of potentialities amongst which one has the ability if not exactly to choose then at least to be aware of the possibility of choice . . . and by this to make available one thing rather than another . . . this was a fancy that it had seemed to me one might take note of like a beautiful stranger passed in the street: but what would it be to possess it, experience it, live with it as if it were normality?

Eventually, he and Julie journey to an island that may or may not be the Garden of the Hesperides, a mythical, Eden-like realm. There they discover what they suppose to be the Tree of Life, though they realize they might be mistaken. The young couple wonders whether it makes any difference whether they are actually in a mystical place or are simply forcing the myth's actualization. Such thoughts lead them to question the role myth-making plays in everyday life; ultimately, both deem it to be a useful practice that confers power back upon the individual, giving one the ability to choose his or her individual fate, while at the same time drawing upon the world's shared mythologies.

The back of The Hesperides Tree mentions, somewhat ominously, that it is "quite possibly the last" novel that Mosley will write. Appropriately, one of the characters observes that, "If it's become a business of not being able to put things into words, then what's the point of going on saying this? . . . Writers don't seem able to put what life's like into words." If it is to be his last novel, Mosley's latest is a worthy epilogue to a career that spans fifteen works of fiction and fifty years. The novel's closing words, "Stop talking," are a wonderful conclusion for a writer that has so frequently observed the difficulty in communicating one's thoughts via speech or writing. A fitting finale for such a humanistic artist, The Hesperides Tree investigates the individual's relationship to humankind, munificently lending a number of possible methods for living both with oneself and the world.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

SPUTNIK SWEETHEART
Haruki Murakami
translated by Philip Gabriel
Knopf ($23)

by Matt Dube

Haruki Murakami's latest novel, Sputnik Sweetheart, tells the story of two would-be lovers. Sumire, a frustrated novelist and college dropout, meets the thirty-something Miu at a wedding reception, and falls immediately in love with the older woman. When Miu offers Sumire a job as her assistant, Sumire leaps at the chance and allows Miu to remake her tattered beatnik self into a completely organized aide-de-camp. The two vacation in Greece after a trip to Europe to arrange the year's sales for Miu's wine importing business. There, they make their first steps toward physical love, but the next day, Sumire disappears to "the other side." The narrator is called in by Miu to help find Sumire, and his attempts to understand what might have led her to that extreme brings him close to crossing over himself. This is classic Murakami territory, the fizzle of frustration with a world that just can't array itself right, and the erotic longings all three characters feel have a direct, physical weight.

Take, for example, the following passage, about the way Sumire describes her feeling for Miu:

"There was this article in the paper the other day," Sumire said, completely oblivious. "It said lesbians are born that way; there's a tiny bone in the inner ear that's completely different from other women's that makes all the difference. Some small bone with a complicated name. . . . I can't get the idea out of my mind of this little good-for-nothing bone inside my ear. Wondering what shape my own little bone is. . . . When I'm with her that bone in my ear starts ringing. Like delicate seashell wind chimes."

The first third of the book, tracing Sumire and Miu's early courtship, is filled with similarly odd episodes and digressions that highlight Murakami's casual mastery of narrative drift. Later, the overlapping narratives of Sumire's dreams and her conversations with Miu on the Greek Island are dizzyingly subtle, and the strange situation the narrator encounters when he returns from Greece is marvelously understated. In other places, though, Murakami is less satisfying: his record of the Greek Island's recent history is banal, and his attempts to describe the passage of the world where Sumire has gone to meet the perfect version of her lover is heavy-handed and stubbornly un-nuanced. This tale of disappearances is one Murakami returns to frequently in his fiction—as early, in fact, as his first novel translated into English, A Wild Sheep's Chase. But he still hasn't mastered that story here, pushing his language up against what cannot be articulated with feet less fleet than flat.

Murakami's novel is at its best when dealing with thwarted desire and the inability to make things work as they should. It is easy to sympathize with the dream of connecting with someone more perfectly than is possible on this material plane, but in this novel that doesn't seem an entirely viable option. Sumire's possible return at the book's close is well handled, and the frustrated epilogue that greets the narrator on his return to Japan is a powerful reminder that it is not only lovers who cannot connect. Like much of Murakami's longer work, Sputnik Sweetheart comes close to giving his readers the transcendence he offers his characters, but then tellingly forces us to stay right here.

UNDERGROUND: THE TOKYO GAS ATTACK AND THE JAPANESE PSYCHE
Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel
Vintage Paperback ($14)

by Jennifer Flanagan

Haruki Murakami is perhaps best-known for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, both complex, intricate novels. In his first non-fiction book, he connects the motifs in his novels—subterranean worlds, convoluted plots—to the theme of Underground.

As in Murakami's fiction, there are many levels to the book. On the surface, it is a series of interviews with victims and victims' family members, followed by interviews with members and former members of Aum Shinrikyo, the sect that carried out the Toyko gas attack. But Underground is more than a powerful forum for people to tell their stories; it also functions as a commentary on Japanese society; an examination of the Japanese psyche; a rebuke of the way in which the media handles tragedy—easily applicable to the United States; and finally, a reminder that this could happen again. Murakami deftly tries to get at the heart of why and how it happened, and compares the Aum followers to Ted Kaczynski; he probably would have included Timothy McVeigh had the book been written after the Oklahoma City bombing.

The insight he offers into Japanese society is considerable. Just the description of a normal commute gives an incredibly vivid sense of Tokyo—trains so crowded that one man speaks of having his briefcase "swallowed up in the torrent of people and swept away. . . . I just had to [let go] or my arm would have been broken. The case just disappeared." During just such a rush hour on March 20, 1995, liquid sarin was released on three trains. The nature of sarin is that once it gets into your clothes, anyone who comes near you is also poisoned from the vapors. Over five-thousand people were treated for sarin gas poisoning, and twelve people died. Many of the survivors continue to experience serious after-effects, from paralysis and loss of speech to constant headaches, loss of vision, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Murakami's desire was to give a clear sense of these victims as people; he provides a brief background sketch of each one, allowing their stories to wander from the personal to the political and back again, telling us that "perhaps it's an occupational hazard of the novelist's profession, but I am less interested in the ‘big picture,' as it were, than in the concrete, irreducible humanity of each individual."

One interesting effect of having the stories placed side-by-side is that they often contain small inconsistencies. Murakami acknowledges this, explaining that he "endeavored to maintain the basic stance that each person's story is true within the context of that story . . . As a result, the stories told by different people who . . . experienced the very same scene often differ . . . but they are presented here with all their contradictions preserved. Because it seems to me that these discrepancies and contradictions say something in themselves. Sometimes . . . inconsistency can be more eloquent than consistency."

When explaining why they didn't offer to help or flee the stations themselves as they witnessed passengers falling down around them, more than one person echoed the comments of Yoko Iizuka: "I knew it was an emergency, but to be honest it didn't occur to me that it was anything really serious. I mean, what can happen? Japan's a supersafe country, isn't it? No guns, no terrorists . . . It never occurred to me that I might be in danger or that I had to get myself out of there." She was one of many passengers who proceeded to her office, finally going to the hospital three hours after being poisoned.

Hospitals had no idea there had been a gas attack, and even after they learned what happened, they often had no idea how to treat victims. One hospital alone received over a thousand patients. Survivors complained of the lack of emergency response, but Nobuo Yanagisawa, the doctor who had treated victims from an earlier sarin attack (Aum had planted sarin one year prior to the Tokyo attack, referred to as the Matsumoto incident, which killed seven people) commented that "to have had five-thousand sarin gas victims and only 12 dead is close to a miracle." Yanagisawa spent the day faxing his findings from that first attack to hospitals across the region. Even so, he remarked "it's almost unthinkable that a doctor would go out of his way to send unsolicited information to a hospital. The first thought is never to say too much, never to overstep one's position. But with the gas attack I had other motives too. One of the seven victims who died in the Matsumoto incident was a medical student here at Shinshu University. . . . That simple fact kept me going."

Murakami refuses the ease of an "us and them/good and evil" attitude, instead exploring what it is in each of us that is reflected in the actions of these home-grown terrorists. His ability to look deeply and honestly at the culture that allowed Aum followers to become so disenfranchised they turned on their own country is both instructive and uncomfortable, especially in the light of our own terrorist incidents. It is also very necessary if we are to learn anything from such tragedies.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

LOUISE IN LOVE
Grove Press ($13)

THE DOWNSTREAM EXTREMITY OF THE ISLE OF SWANS
University of Georgia ($15.95)

by Bonnie Blader

Any single short discussion of Mary Jo Bang's two new books, both published in the Spring of 2001, will only scratch their rich surfaces. Bang deploys her own signature language of perspective, using it so successfully across the span of both books that the reader is invited to intuit its logic and learn to read her. It is "a language / of tongue rolls and lip twists," to borrow from the poem "To Dance the Tarantella," from Downstream Extremity. Alliteration is a fundamental feature; consonants thrust up in her voice stream like stones, turning the current back on itself. "It is from that in water we were from," Robert Frost says in "West Running Brook," "long, long before we were from any creature." Perhaps this explains the appeal of her technique. It invites sensory validation before cognitive sense is even broached.

Nearly a novel in verse, Louise in Love is also a sonic celebration. Sprung rhythms, iambic verse, and created words dance lightly along an upper crust of an invented world. Poems appear mostly in three-line stanzas or flush-left, ragged-right blocks; there is also a single prose poem, named for the title character. The forms affect their emotional density. Bang renders the world of Louise being in, playing with, and suffering love. The arc of her experience is a somewhat surrealistic bumper car journey—a image, in fact, that appears in the book, as does "Yves Tanguy walking a panther."

The collection's cast of characters, one mysteriously called "the other" to whom Louise sometimes turns for grounding or direction, call up an admittedly eclipsed world, one of a "hike to the hillock," "frou-frou," " pretty," "wonder," and "games." This gestured world is evident even in the mannered titles of poems, keeping before us an awareness of artifice that is both a part of the story of love and a part of its hyper-conscious presentation. We invest in the world of the "Dramatis Personae" at the same time we are aware that the story itself is scrutinized. The question of which is most artificial, the created world or the commentary, seems to be an issue the poet herself is happy to raise.

Bang's narrative is remarkably illusive, what the aptly chosen image and apt ear do in collusion. It feels like it's there and it moves: "Lighter, liminal, quite likely / to follow a line completely lacking in depth." ("Like a Fire in a Fire") The three line stanzas that predominate seem part of the narrative illusion, saying beginning, middle, and end repeatedly, but the created world is here thanks to fragmentary images and an achievement of tone created by pace and diction. It is built as if with mirrors artfully set to allow corners to imply whole rooms. So much depends on sound, word texture, and Bang's Hopkins-esque ease: "a hive hum ongoing in the hear ear." She revels in the aural geography of language as formalist painters do in paint, where color is the story, and the stroke composition. From the prose poem "Louise":

Depiction, she said, surfacing in order to say it and fracturing the spell under which they swam in the moment that ended an eon ago. Swans, she said, referring to the needle-neck birds black and white that lined the aisle down which one walked to get to the river on which they were skating away.

Keats is referenced in borrowed italicized lines in a few poems, but it is Woolf who feels more at its heart, as if she is dreaming and this collection is the fragmented warp of her dream. The Woolf-ian sensibility is so pervasive--a line from Mrs. Dalloway even appears in "That Was All, Louise Said, Except For"—that it is a welcome release when Louise appears in one poem with a copy of Mrs. Dalloway in hand.

If narration is at play in Louise in Love, it is perception that is the preoccupation of The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans. On what does perception depend—the ordering/disordering mind or the glimpsed external? The book is divided into three sections, the last not a poem cluster but a high-speed, paragraphed collection of fragments called "Origin of the Impulse to Speak," a biography told in shaping impacts and images. Of course, the subjectivity of the eye is inherent in what one defines as one's life; in the first two sections of the book, among discrete poems, a rough count of words directly referring to sight (see, view, sight, eye) yields 65 instances in 53 pages. Bang is not invested in continuous or traditional narrative (although the poems are populated with personae), but in considering an equilibrium, a territory of influence, between interior and external conditions with the eye—"Poor eye, she said, from the off-center door of her head"—a manipulated vehicle. The eye influences: "the mind is made by eye," and is in turn used, "O the idea of order. It will be seen through."

As in Louise in Love, Bang calls up other poets. Samuel Beckett's "Ohio Impromptu" drives the title; Richard Howard and John Yau loan her lines. But it is a quality in Wallace Stevens's work, his extravagant images, his disinclination for standard narration, and the primacy he grants the imagination over the other reality at its command, that Bang might claim as her tradition. She gives us interior convictions in these poems using artifact images from an exterior reality also, one feels, mostly imagined—"the manhandled grammar of nature," as she says in "Pear and O, an Opera"—as their correlative or proof. What she achieves is no less than a realignment of language to address uniquely felt places. From the title poem:

In the window a jacket cried, Wear me, wear me,
on a street of tall houses, all showing teeth (ash white of ice rut,
of water on rock)—
many their eyes, all shaded by marmalade hoods. O cobra.

I was foreign then, living in a limited range.

Reading across both books, we become aware that Bang echoes herself. Certain images and particular words are repeated. Swans are needle-necked in both books. The word "sliver," usually used in conjunction with light or silver, recurs. One senses a certain insistence on the nature of the natural world on her part, and the press of an idea being offered to us again and again. Bang's aesthetic also conjoins the ancient or archaic with contemporary references: "It's time for the feasting that follows the four men it took / to carry the dead monster's head," begins "Stone, Montana." We hear of pipers, revellers, ringbolts, cigarettes and satellites. We are in all worlds and no known world at once, in all times and no sure time, and must make our own maps as we read. Mary Jo Bang's achievement is in having something wholly there, a language and a philosophy to investigate. Her work teaches us how it will speak. Before we may fully grasp her intricacies, our senses are taken by what is meant.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Raymond Federman
Starcherone Books ($9)

by Rebecca Weaver

The particular story of Raymond Federman's The Voice in the Closet cannot be told conventionally. Originally part of his third novel The Twofold Vibration, this book was excerpted by request of Indiana University Press, who called the section "unreadable." It's fortunate that Federman found another home for the section, because this short book does something hugely innovative: it conflates the known conventions of how we talk and write, since in this case, those conventions no longer serve what needs to be said.

What needs to be said in this book is that survival is possible. The book's journey toward survival is powerfully conveyed on two levels. The first is that of the physical event itself. In a looping, elliptical way, readers come to discover that a boy has been locked into a closet. His mother and father, knowing that the Nazis are coming, hide the boy and escape with their daughters. Sadly, the only one who survives is the boy; he eventually escapes to America and becomes a writer. This is where the second level intersects with the first. The boy becomes the writer Federman, but The Voice in the Closet is spoken in the voice of the boy, who is angry and confused at the way his story has been twisted and retold by the writer: "he failed to generate the real story in vain situates me in the wrong abode as I turn in a void in his obligation to assign a beginning . . ."

There is a struggle for primacy between the two voices, and as the struggle is played throughout the book, the nature of stories and how we tell them is interrogated by the constant probing of memory. After all, whose story is it? The boy's, with whom the experience originated, or the adult Federman's, who has worked to tell the story? It is in this place where fact and memory collide that another sort of oppression takes place, and the inability to make sense of it renders the boy Federman "voiceless." The only way to survive it is to escape a mother tongue that has become fraught with grief and terror, in the same way that the poet (and fellow Holocaust survivor) Paul Celan's mother tongue became for him problematic. The English language, however, is punched through with pitfalls of its own, giving the writer Federman his own linguistic conundrum: "expelled from mother tongue exiled from mother land tongueless he extracts words from other tongues to exact his speechlessness . . ." Thus, conventional language is not adequate for the job of relating the horrific event that begins the journey. The lack of punctuation throughout The Voice in the Closet further underscores the breathless and unrelenting travels between past and present, memory and story.

This book asserts that the only way we can negotiate our histories and our memories is through the acts of telling (and re-telling) those stories. Survival exists in this kind of vigilant effort. The boy begins to forgive the writer, realizing that he, too, can speak, and that the act of speaking—for both Federmans—negates absence and creates hope. Silence is too costly. In the act of speaking, of telling the story again and again, "spring wells up at last."

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

Raymond Federman
Green Integer ($11.95)

by Lance Olsen

Raymond Federman—arguably one of the most important innovative writers working (primarily) in English of the last third of the 20th century—began what he would consider his best novel, The Twofold Vibration, in 1976 and completed it in 1981. The hybrid result is, among other things, part experimental science fiction, part haunting Holocaust narrative, part expansive Rabelaisian satire, and part tragicomic Beckettian investigation into the uncertainties of language, meaning, and the existential condition. But what is extraordinary rereading Federman's narrative from our contemporary vantage point (it is set on December 31, 1999, so that Federman's fictive future has become our fictive past) is how much it prefigures what might be considered the Post-Memoir Memoir: those no-longer-innocent autobiografictions (think, for example, of David Shields's print-based Remote or Shelley Jackson's web-based My Body) which believe, along with the protagonist of The Twofold Vibration, that there exist “no facts to be accurately described, only hypotheses to be set up, no choices of words [which] will express the truth, for one has only a choice of rhetorical masks in a situation like this one.”

The Federmanian “situation like this one” is, unsurprisingly, complicated and ambiguous. An 82-year-old French-Jewish poet and novelist, whose alternative oeuvre echoes Federman's own, waits in a massive holding tank on earth for deportation with hundreds (perhaps thousands, perhaps millions) of others (social remainders, all: the sick, the abnormal, the “useless”) to the space colonies. While it is clear this New Year's Eve ritual has occurred annually since 1994, when the colonies were first established, it is unclear why. Although “informed sources” underscore repeatedly that the deportation is neither conditional upon race nor religion, and it seems evident that these people are not being punished for criminal or other socially untoward activities, the reason for this exile remains indecipherable, as does the nature of the colonies themselves. Are they neo-edens, prisons, something in-between? Is it even possible that they do not exist at all, that the deportees are simply rocketed into space and left there to die, thereby freeing up room on our overcrowded planet?

In any case, this state of affairs is further complicated by the telling. In a layout reminiscent of Beckett's How It Is, paragraph-long “sentences” are composed with few capital letters, no periods, no quotation marks, and a beautifully protracted, rhythmic string of comma splices. The voice of the protagonist, his friends Moinous and Namredef (themselves yet more alter-egos of Federman), the narrator (ditto), and perhaps the author himself circulate through these grammaticules, the linguistic and narratological membrane separating one character from another remarkably permeable, as they construct, collaborate, argue, dismember, and then reconstruct only to once again deconstruct the old man's history in an attempt to reach some understanding about why he has survived as long as he has and why he is being deported now.

Federman thereby appropriates and postmodernizes the SF genre. First, he uses it to create a philosophical parable about the infinite deferral of knowledge at the level of facts and at the level of how we organize and discuss those facts—through, that is, a continually slippery system of signifiers. Second, he uses SF both to metaphorize and interrogate his own memories as a Holocaust survivor. At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1942, as the Gestapo stormed up the stairs to the Federmans' third-floor apartment in Paris, Federman's mother shoved the 12-year-old boy into a closet on the landing, where he remained the rest of that day and most of the following night. When he finally ventured out again, his parents and two sisters had already embarked on the journey that would end in their extermination in Auschwitz. In other words, the questions that the old man and his other selves ask in The Twofold Vibration on his trip from one box (he, too, was shoved into a closet in Paris to avoid the Gestapo) to another (the huge deportation hall) are the same ones Federman has been asking himself for the past 59 years.

One might suppose the consequence of such Post-Memoir material would be somber, stoic, cerebral business indeed. Yet this is precisely where Federman distances himself from such Holocaust writers as Elie Wiesel. The Twofold Vibration, like all of Federman's books, is hugely funny, and Federman himself a one-man Laurel and Hardy of narratology and epistemology. If Wiesel's work is about the grim and necessary task of documenting the unspeakable, then Federman's is about the dynamic and equally necessary task of troubling that documentation and ultimately moving beyond the unspeakable to learn how to exist in its wake. “I am a survivor,” the old man tells June Fanon, the young Jane Fonda-like woman with whom he is having a robust affair, as he speeds his blue Alfa Romeo through the narrow, winding mountain roads on his way to gamble at Lake Como:

I'm not morbid, I'm happy, can't you see, yes happy to be here with you, but you see the fact of being a survivor, of living with one's death behind, in a way makes you free, free and irresponsible toward your own end, of course you feel a little guilty while you're surviving because there is this thing about your past, your dead past and all that, but you have to get on with things, sustain your excessiveness, so to speak . . .

And this has precisely been Federman's project for more than a third of a century: to create a Literature of Exuberance as the only response to the horrors of the contemporary, to pack the page with rich and textured discourse, to move beyond the metaphorical silence of death into a self-aware cacophony of life—part transcendence, part ebullient, iconoclastic escape. Like The Twofold Vibration's old man after a bout of tuberculosis, Federman attempts to laugh himself back to health.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

PARADISE HOTEL AND OTHER PLAYS
Richard Foreman
The Overlook Press ($29.95)

RICHARD FOREMAN
edited by Gerald Rabkin
Johns Hopkins University Press ($19.95)

by Aaron Kunin

The subject says to the object: "I destroyed you," and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: "Hullo object!" "I destroyed you." "I love you." "You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you." "While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy."
--D.W. Winnicott

Richard Foreman writes, designs, and directs plays; he also writes polemical essays and gives interviews about the plays. Some of the results of this activity, which includes nearly every avenue for the production and reception of his work except for onstage performance (a point to which I shall return shortly), are collected in two new books: Paradise Hotel and Other Plays, which consists of texts and brief production notes for plays produced at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in the late nineties; and the retrospective anthology Richard Foreman, edited by Gerald Rabkin, which includes Foreman's interviews, essays, and program notes, as well as critical essays and notices by theater historians, academic critics, and journalists.

Maybe the publication of a book is not as significant an occasion for assessing Foreman's career as the production of a new play. But the history of theater will ultimately be written by people whose relation to theater is primarily text-based. And, too, Foreman, who says that "the real subject of theater is death" as long as plays are enacted in accordance with a predetermined script, insists he's primarily a writer ("my writing pushes further ahead, faster, in terms of stylistic, aesthetic adventure, than does my staging"), and that the basic model for his theater is reading. In other words, the performances are supposed to bring out the text, clarify it, as much as possible; in a sense, they're conceived as external and anterior to another event that they're supposed to document: Foreman writing in his notebook.

For example: in the 1974 play Rhoda in Potatoland, a crew person "resembling Richard Foreman" comes onstage and asks Rhoda, played by Kate Manheim, if she is "the famous Richard Foreman." Rhoda: "Yes." Crew person: "It's an honor to meet you." One thing this moment suggests is that the character played by Kate Manheim is standing in for Richard Foreman as a kind of surrogate writer/director/designer. Since Kate Manheim performs as Rhoda in nearly all the plays from the early seventies, a period that Rabkin calls the "middle period" in the history of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater but which could just as easily be called the "Rhoda period," it seems possible that that character is generally available to stand in for Foreman. Or one might read this moment not as a statement of surrogate authorship but more simply as a statement of authorship: Kate Manheim is the writer/director/designer and therefore deserves to be addressed as "Richard Foreman."

I'm just stating the obvious. What's surprising is that Rabkin, who writes about this moment in the introduction to the anthology Richard Foreman, doesn't see it. Instead, he uses this moment to make the much less obvious point that Foreman and Manheim are opposed figures: "If she possesses a weighty antagonist, it is Foreman himself, present through the sepulchral tones of his taped voice or his invisible hands on the audio controls." She is the "physical presence" that his "philosophic mind could not ignore"; he is the subject, she is the object; he is the experimenting agent, she is the patient who's there to be "harassed and tormented." Richard Schechner's essay on Rhoda in Potatoland, which appears later in the collection, makes the same non-obvious point in a more extreme form: "The sexual struggle in Foreman's plays . . . is the male's illusion that he can transform the woman into something like himself by imposing on her the strictures of literature." Here, then, is one reason why Schechner (and perhaps Rabkin) can't see Rhoda as author: because he thinks that Foreman could not possibly identify across genders with a character played by a woman. For Schechner, a crude sexual politics in which "man" and "woman" are elemental categories has the status of the obvious, while the idea of cross-gender identification has the status of "illusion."

Another reason why none of the critics in the Rabkin anthology sees this reading is that Foreman doesn't seem to see it either. Consider a moment in one of the "chamber plays" from the eighties in which Manheim, playing the character identified in the stage directions as "Kate" (but in the main text usually called "Paula"), addresses a speech to a voodoo doll: "You say ‘trivial' and a word lights up on a distant mountain." Again, it's a suggestive moment, and it clearly shows, among other things, that Manheim is acting as an author-surrogate: like the director of a play, she's manipulating the speech and movements of a human figure (the doll). Foreman, in a note, draws out practically every implication of this scene except for the obvious one: "As Kate delivered the speech, aspects of the character's relation to working people, including the fact that she had never been forced to do meaningless work to make a living, seemed to crystallize . . . It's also true, however, that Kate herself had worked at various menial jobs when she was younger . . . my idea was that by holding the doll and half talking to it, the doll would stand in for a side of herself she had never encountered, so she was actually talking to her own fear." Foreman seems to undergo a failure of imagination somewhere beyond normative sexual politics; his brilliant self-critique, which is almost as good as the play (one way of expressing the difference: the critique is on the side of the rational, the play isn't), is attentive to the play's complex arrangement of subject-object positions except in this one respect, where it's totally blind.

It's no accident that the critics in Rabkin's anthology are blind in exactly the same place. This is probably because they're taking their cues from Foreman, who has been unusually successful in his efforts to control—or direct—the reception of his work. In this sense, all of the critics could answer "yes" to the question: "Aren't you the famous Richard Foreman?" Some of them may approve or disapprove of various strategies and effects in the plays, but all of them are fundamentally sympathetic to Foreman in the sense that they unquestioningly accept his statements about himself. (One exception to this rule would be Jalal Toufic, who unfortunately is not represented in the Rabkin anthology; his letter to Richard Foreman, published in Over-Sensitivity, is at once attentive and unsympathetic, and offers a much more radical interpretation of the Rhoda character than the one I suggest above.)

You might even say that the critics who disapprove are the more sympathetic group, if their disapproval is registering the increasing anti-theatricality of the recent plays. The Ontological-Hysteric Theater seems to have become the only kind of theater that Foreman likes, and he doesn't seem to like that particularly either. "I've reached a point," Foreman tells Elizabeth LeCompte, "where I'm not sure I could give up writing. But I could give up directing, I think." This anti-theatrical tendency is amply documented in Paradise Hotel and Other Plays. The opening line of Pearls for Pigs: "I hate the actors who appear in this play." Next line: "What I hate is the play." Paradise Hotel itself opens with the announcement that the play has been replaced by "a much more disturbing, and possibly illegal, play entitled—'Hotel Fuck'!," which is similarly in danger of degenerating into a "much LESS provocatively titled play, entitled ‘Hotel Beautiful Roses.'" ("Oh my God, that DOES sound like a boring play!" a character later exclaims.)

The new plays also amply document, despite the lack of any encouragement from Foreman or his critics, a sophisticated analysis of sexual politics. When, in Paradise Hotel, Giza enters in full Louis XIV style, bearing before him "a big black-and-gold striped dildo," it's obvious that we're seeing some kind of projected idealization of Foreman's body-image, but it's equally obvious that we're seeing an idealized erotic object whose visible sign of sexual differentiation is not only detachable but actually detached and worn by some of the women who appear in the play. (Let's not forget that one of Foreman's privileged antecedents is Jack Smith, who made the cinematic "Scheherezade party" Flaming Creatures.) Or, to take a less outrageous example, the actor David Greenspan, who appears in drag as the character "Madame" in Benita Canova, is a likely author-surrogate (especially because Greenspan is also a playwright and director); and so is the protagonist Benita, who tends to speak of herself in the third person and whose gaze, like the "Rhoda stare," has uncanny effects on those who encounter it.

I'm concentrating on a blind spot in Foreman's self-critique partly out of a desire to see his work from outside. But my way of doing this—using Foreman against Foreman—is ultimately sympathetic. (Am I the famous Richard Foreman? "Yes.") My point, which is also Foreman's point, is that subject and object are never static positions. Foreman knows that every object we encounter comes with a set of instructions detailing the intended uses of the object and, sometimes, penalties for improper uses. ("I am a lamp. I go on. I go off. Don't try to do anything with me that you should not do with a lamp.") He also knows that the instruction manual is far from complete. ("I am a lamp. But I can also be a projectile that you hurl at your enemy. I could also be something that you can lay on its side and put ketchup on and try tasting to see if it tastes good.") And he knows that people come with similar, albeit longer, instructions. But Foreman, who is something of a materialist monist, doesn't recognize any strong distinction between people and objects, or, for that matter, between mind and body. You can say that Giza's Louis XIV get-up is an objective correlative of his self-image, but that's really a false distinction if, as Foreman says elsewhere, "it's the same material, head and sky."

If that's true, then there's no real difference between what's inside the plays and what's outside. This insight may explain Foreman's reluctance to participate fully as a performer in his plays; it may also explain the persistent recurrence of the "world of art" metaphor in his statements about theater, a metaphor that traditionally subtends a realist-illusionist aesthetic. It's possible that Foreman can't fully appear onstage because he respects a division between the real world and the world of the theater. Thus, he can appear onstage only as a recorded voice, as a film or video image, or through versions of himself played by actors; or, if he does physically appear onstage, the name "Richard Foreman" must be given to someone else. But maybe the explanation for these restrictions on Foreman's representation of himself is precisely that he doesn't appreciate a distinction between art and reality, or that he's waiting for that false distinction to evaporate. Maybe he's waiting to go onstage when there's no longer any division between onstage and offstage. Maybe that's what he means when he says "I have absolutely no goals anymore, except maybe to get out of the theater."

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001

by Jeremy Smith

RED MARS, BLUE MARS, GREEN MARS                                                      Kim Stanley Robinson
Bantam Books ($7.19)

Staring at the screensaver on my computer—an image of stars flying past as though the viewer were on a starship traveling faster than light—it hit me that human beings would one day accomplish this feat, maybe not as quickly or dramatically as we see on Star Trek, but some day, some way. We have simply invested too much time imagining the experience for it never to happen.

I feel the same way about the idea of utopia, the "no place" where we will live in balance with each other and with nature. Utopia, says culture critic Russell Jacoby, is the conviction "that the future could fundamentally surpass the present." We live in a time when many have lost this conviction, and to find it again is to find hope for a better future.

Although most leftists don't know it, Kim Stanley Robinson is one of America's best-selling and most visionary left-wing novelists. His three award-winning Mars novels chronicle the colonization of Mars from the viewpoints of dozens of characters over the course of a century. Recently completed by the publication of a coda volume, The Martians, at the end of last year, Robinson's Mars books are probably the most successful attempt to reach a mass audience with an anti-capitalist utopian vision since Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 novel, The Dispossessed.

Robinson stands on many shoulders. Utopia, the perfect place, is always conceptualized from within the limitations of where we actually live. As old visions are chastened by the reality of their attempted implementation, our idea of perfection has changed over the past century. In literature, utopia as we know it begins with H.G. Wells, Edward Bellamy, and hundreds of lesser-known contemporary authors, all of whom were products of the late-19th-century socialist movement which consciously held their novels up as visions of a better, socialist future. It's a strategy that recruited millions worldwide.

In the classic Looking Backward, Bellamy's hero wakes from a one-hundred-year sleep to the futuristic year 2000, when the abolishment of private property has liberated humanity from scarcity, greed, and lust for power. In the typical turn-of-the-last-century utopia, which reaches back to Plato's Republic, society is egalitarian but run on a military model, with production and consumption regulated by technocratic elites. Culture is the superior scientific (and often Christian) culture of the Northern hemisphere, driven by macro-technologies: heavy industry, eugenics, centralized planning, atomic energy, space travel, and building of colossal scale. This is the vision that shaped the Soviet Union, which sought to one-up the capitalists in efficiency by establishing "industrial armies," as they are called in the Communist Manifesto.

Experience is a bitter critic of utopia, and in the period following World War II, the modernist utopia was turned on its head in the novels of William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, and J.G. Ballard.

Living as a heroin junky in Spanish-occupied Morocco in the mid-50s, William Burroughs conceived of divided Tangiers as a metaphor for the modern world, a point of convergence—the "Interzone"—for conflicting cultures, competing powers, and addicts and exiles of all types. Like George Orwell's 1984, his fragmentary novel Naked Lunch uses science fiction motifs to depict a consciousness shaped by drugs and mass media, in a world where technology is used as an instrument of control, not liberation.

As prisoners-of-war, Vonnegut witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, and Ballard saw the flash of the atomic bomb from the coast of China. For many of their generation, the experiences of Dresden, Hiroshima, forced agricultural collectivization, and the Holocaust ended forever the faith in technological progress that was the cornerstone of early-century utopianism. Scientists no longer looked like disinterested searchers for truth, but servants of military-industrial complexes East and West.

In the 1960s and 70s, nationalist revolts, evidence of growing ecological disaster, feminism, and the Civil Rights movements provided the experiential basis of the New Left, which rejected the monoculturalism and five-year plans of their Social Democratic and Communist elders. The writers influenced by the New Left and counterculture—particularly Marge Piercy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany—wrote allegorical novels of social, not scientific, speculation. Their utopias and dystopias pivot on the reconciliation (or altogether elimination) of gender and racial difference, sometimes even suggesting that the good society would be primitive and post-technological.

In 1984, William Gibson published Nueromancer—the novel that first conceptualized and named cyberspace, when such a thing was only an apple in the eye of the National Science Foundation. The resulting sub-genre—cyberpunk—broke from old-school science fiction by focusing on all-pervasive micro-technologies such as bioengineering, information technology, and quantum mechanics. In Gibson's novels, cyberspace is not merely a communications medium—it is utopia, literally "no place," a "consensual hallucination" achieved through microchips instead of drugs, but also a hyperreal escape from the stricken, corporate-run world outside.

Cyberpunk cities are dystopian, but reflect a post-modern hip-hop sensibility: polyglot and multicultural, ecologically devastated, media saturated, cluttered with cultural and technological debris, dominated by centralized corporations and shaped by the values of the market. Their world centers around Asia, particularly Japan, not Europe or North America. Cyberpunk has its progressive aspects, but there is little in this future that counters global capitalism. They are stories of survival, not hope.

Against the limits of dystopia, we return to Kim Stanley Robinson and his Mars books. "The dystopian cliché of our times is just too easy," he says in a 1996 online interview, "it no longer says ‘Don't go this way' but rather ‘This is the only way no matter what you do, so don't try to fight it.' That kind of dystopia is reinforcing of the status quo, it's a capitulation."

In the first novel, Red Mars, a culturally and ideologically diverse group of scientists—the "First Hundred"—land and begin the terraformation of Mars. They are followed by hundreds of thousands of others. The Earth from which his multinational colonists escape could very well be the same globalized Earth described by cyberpunk—resources are depleted, populations and ocean levels are rising, and transnational corporations are all-powerful.

Robinson, however, inverts the cyberpunk sensibility, harnessing its technological obsessions to the pursuit of utopia on Mars. The Mars books are an ambitious attempt to reclaim the soul of science by uncoupling it from the profit motive and hitching it back up to the project of building a better world. His vision reaches back to Looking Backward, but successfully assimilates ecology, feminism, and post-modern multiculturalism.

Robinson gets around the narrow and undemocratic implications of science fiction's traditional rule of scientists and engineers by quite logically making everyone on Mars a scientist or engineer—an elect lifted to heaven by their virtue (a millennial trope that utopianism can't seem to live without). Their exploitation by transnational corporations leads to a spectacular showdown between the complicated but essentially good scientists and the bad although all-too-human capitalists. The scientists' revolt fails, and in the second book, Blue Mars, they go underground to intentional communities based on ecological, feminist, and communitarian principles.

A second—this time mostly non-violent—anti-capitalist revolt succeeds, and at the beginning of the third book, Green Mars, the good scientists and their children embark upon the arduous work of building a Mars-wide utopia, using the experience of their intentional communities as reference points. Meanwhile, an Earth dominated by corporations continues to be swallowed by disaster, straggling (like Europe in the twentieth century) behind the New World.

The Martian utopia begins with the idea of an independent Mars "as a world rather than a nation," composed of many different cultures. Inalienable rights include "the material basics of existence, health care, education, and legal equality." The land, air, and water of terraformed Mars "are in the common stewardship of the human family." Finally, "the fruits of an individual's labor . . . cannot be appropriated by another individual or group . . . human labor on Mars is part of a communal enterprise."

The last two items—ecology and economic democracy—are conceptually merged into "eco-economics," a system where "efficiency equals the calories you put out, divided by the calories you take in."

Prices are determined by the caloric value of the object or service. "Everyone . . . makes their living . . . based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology," a calculation that also measures human impact on the environment. On Robinson's 22nd-century-Mars, work is play. Economic activity is organized in huge worker-run cooperatives, regulated by special environmental courts, a system incapable of producing predators who take more out of the system than they put in.

If this sounds fantastic and unlikely, well, of course it does—that's science fiction, where walls drop from around the present and we gain the freedom to imagine a range of possible (if not probable) futures. For those whose imaginations have failed them, the future extends only to the next bottom line. But for the rest, there is little choice but to imagine a better way to live, before the problems created by our technology overwhelm us.

Editor's Note: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars novels are all available from Bantam Books.

Click here to purchase Red Mars at your local independent bookstore

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Click here to purchase Blue Mars at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001